Elephants and rhinos benefit from drone surveillance

Poachers beware. Surveillance drones offer a highly effective way to catch wildlife criminals in the act. Namibia's Ministry of Environment and Tourism (MET) came to this conclusion after trialling a raft of wildlife crime-fighting technologies, with expertise from conservation group WWF and funding from Google.

In field tests conducted in two national parks in November 2013, drones with 2-metre wingspans flew day and night missions to video black rhino herds and send live footage to poacher-tracking rangers on the ground. Smart radio tags attached to rhinos allowed the drones to home in on each herd's current location, says Pierre du Preez, MET's chief conservation scientist.

"We broke new ground using technologies that have never been integrated before to provide powerful wildlife protection," says Crawford Allan, leader of the Wildlife Crime Technology Project at WWF. The MET says it will now press ahead and deploy drones in areas of Namibia where rhinos and elephants roam. WWF estimates that illegal poaching in Africa nets criminals $10 billion each year – with some 22,000 elephants killed annually and 1000 rhinos killed last year in South Africa alone.

Technology for nature

MET's use of high-tech ways to protect wildlife echoes that of Technology For Nature (TfN), a joint venture of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, University College London and the Zoological Society of London. Led by Lucas Joppa and Siamak Tavakoli at Microsoft, TfN is getting similar drone and animal-tagging projects off the ground in the Republic of the Congo, the Seychelles and Zambia.

One of the TfN collaborators, Paul Schuette of Montana State University in Bozeman, is also a research ecologist with the Zambian Carnivore Program in Mfuwe, which protects cheetahs from poachers. "What WWF has been doing with MET in Namibia is very important," says Schuette. "These types of technologies should allow us to make great strides in protecting threatened species."

But he warns that the seemingly unlimited possibilities offered by such surveillance technologies need investigation. "It's crucial that we conduct field trials of the various methods to find the most cost-effective, practical, and sustainable strategy or combination of strategies," he says.

The Zambian Carnivore Program will be testing a pair of VHF-radio-equipped quadcopter drones in the US soon, Schuette says – and he hopes to begin testing the miniature aircraft in Kafue National Park in Zambia in May.

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An eye in the sky to watch out for poachers (Image: Helge Denker, NACSO/WWF In Namibia)